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the mechanistic and ended up with the sun
and the day’s cycles…
AGA: We left for a little break from
professional practice to concentrate on re-
search and give everything we had on our
hands a turnaround. And we discovered the
lightweight in fabrication, and the global
against the localizing of architecture, and
how this affected the industry of classic
prefabrication. Then we had to empirically
demonstrate that everything we were work-
ing on – the idea that a kit of parts could be
fabricated on one side of the Atlantic, trans-
ported to the other side, and assembled – was
feasible. These procedures are the fruit of
research but are developed in the real world,
and we developed them ourselves because it
was clear to us that if we told anyone that
we would build them a house in Valdemoro
but install it in Massachusetts, they would
think we were mad.
As for landscape, it took The Truffle ten
years to culturally mature. And the maturing
of this project enabled a client to understand
it, and we went from the scale of the room
to the scale of the pavilion, which made it
possible for us to execute the procedures in
Montana. The idea is that these two aspects
produce so strong an energy between them
that they can generate something new. Now
we joke about creating a startup, WoHo, that
plays with market rules, and later a startdown
going by the designs of the earth as substra-
tum, poetic and material aspiration.
Prefabrication is about the ordinary, the
everyday, but elevates architecture to a level
it has never had. We are now at an inflec-
tion point that I believe has never happened
before in the history of architecture. Indeed
I believe that for the first time, we are start-
ing to glimpse the vision of buildings as
constructions that will not go up in the place
where they are assembled. There are isolated
examples, but on an industrial level, on a
social-mission level, it’s happening now.
